You Belong Here: A conversation with Kim Dabbs

You Belong Here: A conversation with Kim Dabbs

Join us for a captivating fireside chat with Kim Dabbs, Steelcase executive and author, as she delves into the transformative themes of her book, "You Belong Here: The Power of Being Seen, Heard, and Valued on Your Own Terms." In this intimate gathering, we'll explore the profound journey towards self-acceptance and genuine connection. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and uplifted as we embark on an exploration of belonging, authenticity, and the profound impact of being truly understood. You won't want to miss this opportunity.

In a world overcrowded with labels, don’t allow your identity to be defined by other people. Learn how to take back your power, choose to feed the aspects of your identity that serve you, and let go of those that don’t.

Everyone feels like an outsider at some point in their life—when we walk into a room and think to ourselves, “I don’t belong here.” To avoid these feelings of exclusion, many of us hide our authentic selves and allow others to define our identity.

You Belong Here offers a new framework that allows each of us to define how we want to be seen, heard, and valued on our own terms so we feel a sense of belonging in any situation. Further, it serves as a launchpad for organizational leaders and culture builders to create safe spaces for individuals to show up as their authentic selves.
 

This book explains our four identities:

• Our Lived Identity is made up of the aspects of our identity we inherit when we are born into the world.
• Our Learned Identity includes the parts of our identity that we’ve chosen or claimed as we make our way through the world.
• Our Lingering Identity is the identity we default to when we feel like an outsider and fall back into as a survival mechanism.
• Our Loved Identity is where we find our authentic selves and see ourselves through a lens of empowerment.

In the journey to understand our past experiences and how society has established barriers to entry, we can design our own future, rooted in our Loved Identity. We learn to rewrite the stories that aren’t serving us and embrace the ones that do. Rather than look for a seat at someone else’s table, we find the tools to build our own.

When we fully leverage this and live with authenticity and purpose, we can be seen, heard, and valued in a way that gives us a sense of belonging at home, at work, and in society. Belonging is realized when we understand everyone is an outsider and it’s the power to create space for those differences that unite us all.

About Kim Dabbs

Kim Dabbs is a global leader in the area of belonging and purpose. For the past two decades, her work—spanning both the nonprofit and corporate sector in the United States and abroad—has focused on helping individuals, team leaders, organizations, and communities gain the tools to create a more equitable and inclusive world.

Kim has given talks on identity and building cultures of be- longing at such organizations as TEDx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Aspen Institute, the Drucker Forum, the Equity Lounge at the World Economic Forum, and the Guggenheim. She has received numerous recognitions throughout her career. These include a Joyce Fellowship from Americans for the Arts, a three-month residency at Stanford’s d school with leadership training in human-centered design, and being selected as an innovation coach at IDEO U. While serving as the executive director of the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology (WMCAT), Kim and her team crafted a new model rooted in holistic belonging for both adult career training and teen arts + tech engagement, leading to WMCAT’s recognition by the White House as a national best practice.

Kim currently serves as the global vice president of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and social innovation at Steelcase, a global design firm and thought leader in the future of work. For more than a century, Steelcase has designed, manufactured, and partnered with the world’s leading organizations to create furnishings and solutions for the many places where work happens. Kim leads the organization in setting a bold global ESG strategy to build a more sustainable, inclusive, and equitable world. She works with the executive leaders of their global clients and communities to design cultural transformation projects investing in social impact initiatives where they live and work to ensure long-term impact.

During the seven years Kim has been part of the executive team, Steelcase continues to lead the industry in practices for people and the planet, earning a perfect 1 hundred point score on the Corporate Equality Index issued by the Human Rights Campaign. In addition, Steelcase has been named as one of the top fifty community-minded companies by the Points of Light foundation, recognized by Forbes as one of the Best Employers for Women, and named as one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by Fortune magazine.

Prior to joining Steelcase, Kim led nonprofit organizations in the equity, education, and public policy spaces. The longer she experienced barriers to progress for the organizations and the people she served, the more she wanted to work at scale within the systems that she saw as the root cause of many of these systemic barriers. At Steelcase, Kim reimagines capitalism from the inside out by mobilizing the organization’s twelve thousand employees, seven hundred seventy dealership locations, and more than three billion dollars in annual revenue to point the future toward people and the planet to help the world work better. She currently lives in Munich, Germany, with her family.

EVENT DETAILS
Date: April 9
Time: 4-6 p.m.
Cost:  $10 Members , $20 Nonmembers

Corporate investor gratis tickets limited to 3. 
Refreshments will be provided